Ryan SookRezensionen

1043

1525

A great 6-issue comic that focused on a hellish time for one inmate in Arkham Asylum.

Cape may

3.5 ⭐️

I sort of liked it, especially the art. However, I felt the story lacked motivation and direct appeal. It also felt convoluted and forced. The art was great though, and I loved the various Batman (Batmen?) they depicted throughout the ages.

Overall, I can't say I was impressed. It was good, just not excellent.

Really wish I had a 3.5 to give out here. The initial "caveman Batman" segment is actually pretty cool, and the wrap-up stuff that ties back in to the main Batman storyline with Doctor Hurt and Darkseid is great (the panels-within-panels layout towards the end is possibly my favorite bit of comics art ever), but the middle witch-hunter/pirate/cowboy Batman parts are just...middling.

One of the best Buffy comics from before Whedon introduced the various lines of canon stories. The ending is a bit bland, but this is otherwise great, with character voices being on-point, and the emotional core being superb due to choosing to centre it on Giles' dealing with a character death having happened on the show. Some small details are a bit off compared to the continutiy later established on the show itself (this was written during the show's early years), but never even close to the point of outright contradicting or jarring you out of the story.

Also, giant fire bird.

Banished into history by Darkseid, the amnesiac Batman makes his way back to the present, living out numerous lives and roles in the process. The Justice League, with the help of Rip Hunter, attempts to track him, always one step behind. A bit confusing at times; I didn't understand how Darkseid "turned Batman into a weapon." Still, interesting to see the elements of Morrison's long game come together: the seeds of Doctor Hurt, the clues that Dick Grayson found in [b:Batman and Robin Vol. 2|7395327|Batman and Robin Vol. 2 Batman vs. Robin|Grant Morrison|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RQUoI-8zL._SL75_.jpg|9276736].

I've never been a fan of Morrison, nor do/did I enjoy his Batman run.

5 stars for reminders of how badass Batman is.

A theoretically good idea that falls apart, like a lot of Morrisons work, in the last quarter, with time travel metaphysics, alternate universe theory and a lot of Mumbo jumbo that really only he can understand. The concept and delivery of a lot of it, was good and the various shades of Batman that we see through the ages is intriguing and leads to thoughts of other spin offs, but the conclusion felt garbled, mixed up and unsatisfactory. For fans and completists only.½

Set during season two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doug Petrie and Ryan Sook's Ring of Fire pits the Slayer and the Scooby Gang against Angel, Spike, and Dru, who are attempting to resurrect an ancient Japanese demon. Meanwhile, Giles continues to suffer following Jenny Calendar's death and tries to resurrect her. Petrie, as a writer on the show, effortlessly works his story into the existing continuity while Sook's art fits the dark, gothic nature of the story. As a non-canon story, it had no effect on either the series or the canonical comics continuation, but it's entertaining and represents the quality storytelling of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Uh, so, Batman hopscotching through time (and often being found by a nice big time monster). That's the basic story line of this TPB collection. He gets to be stuck in the time of the colonies, of pirates, of cavemen, and Victorian time as well.

Of course, at the same time the JLA is trying to prepare for if Batman comes back to the present, loaded with an energy that could destroy the world or something... again.

The art wasn't bad (though I didn't love the second artist in the TPB). And since it was Grant Morrison, the writing was pretty good.

I do wish that every once in a while DC (or Marvel for that matter) would do a simple story instead of these mind-bendingly confusing ones.

This isn't much more than a villain's showcase in Arkham Asylum, and mostly without Batman. I wasn't highly impressed, though it does give some good back story to a few characters, one of which I didn't have a lot of knowledge of. There are better villain's books than this one, and those also include Batman in a way. I much preferred Joker's Asylum over this one. The artwork in this was not mind-blowing either.

Time travel plus Batman should equal awesome in my book. They're two of my favourite tastes; surely they should taste great together? But I was left kind of cold by this tale of Bruce Wayne clawing his way blindly back to contemporary Gotham through various ages. I read it in the prescribed context - after Batman & Robin volumes one and two, and Time and the Batman - but the larger story Bruce's brief adventures are meant to convey seemed rather dull. Indeed, I didn't expect there to be a larger story, since Batman has lost his memories throughout his journey. Well, mostly lost - it's Hollywood style amnesia.

That said, I liked the (oddly caucasian) early human, Pilgrim witch hunter and old west incarnations, though they had their flaws too: witch hunter Batman was easy to confuse with his rival in their identical Pilgrim outfits, and old west Batman's only major contribution was to be impossibly cool by outdrawing gunfighters using only batarangs. The fragmented story these parts were supposed to draw together got entirely in the way of any kind of interesting vignette of Bruce Wayne dealing with another era: he never does any detection (except as a witch hunter) and seems like a ghost haunting his own story. The tension supposedly set up by the threat he represents - talked about constantly by Batman's modern friends in flash forwards - never feels real, either, so its resolution comes as a let down rather than a pay off.

The Return of Bruce Wayne is some fun, perhaps, and it's not not awful. I can't help but feel that maybe I'm missing something, though, and given my back catalogue of Elseworlds titles has much better versions of pirate and noir Batmen, it's hard not to see this as a lost opportunity.

Could have done without the literal supernatural element.

I probably would have enjoyed this more if I'd read all the stuff that came before. Definitely not for casual readers.

I have read and enjoyed many comics written by Grant Morrison, and then I have read others that struck me as a kind of low-grade metaphysical action writing: a spew of cultural information thrown at the rough grid that is the basic foundation of comics, with the expectation that readers would make sense of it, and credit him with the ability to construct disparate connections between far-flung subjects.

This book fits fully into the latter group. For all the strengths of such Morrison books as We3, his Animal Man writing, his run on the X-Men, his excellent Superman -- well, this collection of stories about Bruce Wayne's return from the depths of time is perhaps the strongest evidence of what could be called the "deceitful claptrap" thread running through other of his work.

On the surface, the idea is strong: Batman is the least super-powered, the least supernatural, of superheroes in the DC pantheon. To have him barrel through time, from prehistoric mythology through sea-faring pirates and Salem-era witchcraft, is to have a study in contrasts. Morrison knows what he's doing. He knows that Batman is a myth of a man, and that no myth as strong as his could grow to the fore without slowly tossing seeds back in the timeline -- all myths build on pre-existing myths, and the stronger the new myth the more likely the older ones are to come to appear less as precedent and more as prefiguring.

But the thesis is where the book stops being enjoyable. Beyond that, it is a series of pastiche renderings of various period cliches, each garbled just enough to appear mysterious, but in truth the mystery is really just sloppiness benefiting from a very strong brain and some accomplished illustrating partners.

I always thought Morrison's best work was his work-for-hire, when he had to limit his fathomless penchant for mythmaking to the contours of a pre-existing character. It was true of his X-Men, and of his Superman, and quite recently of his Batman, but this time around his worst inclinations got the better of him.

Let's see, where should I start. There was a lot going on with this graphic novel. And I mean a lot. I haven't read many Batman comics so that may be why I was confused as hell for a good chunk of the book. By the time I was starting to understand what was happening, the book was almost over. A little background information or maybe a recap of the previous volume would have been helpful.

Besides that it was actually quite interesting. The time travelling thing was really complicated, but I loved seeing Batman travel through different time periods. He went from caveman to priest to pirate to cowboy all in one book.

I also liked seeing the Justice League involved in this book. In most Batman books, Bruce Wayne works alone or with Robin, but here you can see there are other people willing to help him out. The Justice League appears every once in a while in the book, but not so often that it feels more like reading a Justice League comic. Most of the plot is still centered around Batman.

I liked the artwork in this. Sometimes super hero comics don't have great artwork, but this one's was pretty good. Especially because the illustrator can draw so many different settings and a different Batman to go with each one.

By the ending I was still a little confused, but I got the gist of the plot. And the ending itself was great. A little but expected, but it's how I would have wanted it to end.

it was a good thing to read when you have the spare time. the thing that si very good is that it is not childish. (: (: (: (:

A compilation of stories dealing with Bruce Wayne's return after being apparently killed by Darkseid when Batman successfully stopped his plan for conquest. Bruce Wayne is sent back in time, initially to cavemen days, his memory gone. In each story, Bruce Wayne jumps ahead to a more recent period of history. What he (apparently) is unaware of is that this is a back-up Darkseid plan to destroy our universe by saturating Batman with Omega energy, which will have cataclysmic results when he makes his way to his own time. He is being pursued by the JLA to prevent this, all unaware that Batman has a plan to defeat Darkseid's final strike. Each story from a different time has some commonalities, such as Vandall Savage (the immortal caveman), eclipses, the Bat icon, a mysterious book of secrets... The concept itself is intriguing and imaginative, and often well-executed. But all in all, this is an overloaded mess of a story that even two veterans of the Batman books like myself and my son Ben had difficulty plowing through. The storyline had the potential to be a lot better than it turned out. But at least Bruce Wayne is back; it'll be interesting to see how things shake out with his son Damian, Dick Grayson and Tim Drake.

A pretty solid introduction to the characters for new readers, and a pretty good start for the series as a whole, X-Factor is written in a film-noir style with an art style to match. The team, based out of District X, the former 'mutant town' until the events of House of M negated the X-gene in almost every mutant on Earth, wants to know what happened and why. And who is Layla Miller, and how/why does she she 'know stuff' and why doesn't she want X-Factor to learn the truth about the Decimation? Who is Singularity Investigations? So many questions in such a short time for a new series, and yet I was OK with that and want to go back for more.½

This comic was good until the last section where it ended up becoming supernatual. This to me showed that the writer had no where else to go with the plot. Also the hinting toward White being the worst person on earth was a little to unbelievable. Other than that it was good.

It's difficult to follow-up a ground-breaking graphic novel, especially one that is as enervated as this. It lacks the intrigue and great writing in the original; so much so, that I had no interest in finishing it.